Walter Gilbert Quotes

If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!

To many people, 'biodiversity' is almost synonymous with the word 'nature,' and 'nature' brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.

Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.

We are all part of the ecosystem.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.

Nature is an incredible cooperative. When things operate outside of that cooperative, they die off. It's a very simple rule that nature operates under.

It's fair to say when you go out and walk in the woods or on a beach, the most conspicuous forms of life you will see are plants and animals, and certainly there's a huge diversity of those types of organisms, perhaps 10 million animal species and several hundred thousand plant species.

Because of my medical and ideological training, I am accustomed to saying that life is adaptation and symbiosis.

Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.'

It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose.

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

A long time ago, I became aware that many of us have a tendency to lump nature into simplistic categories, such as what we consider beautiful or ugly, important or unimportant. As human a thing as that is to do, I think it often leads us to misunderstand the respective roles of life forms and their interconnectedness.

The most important principle of environment is that you are not the only element.

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

Again and again we are confronted with the reality - some might say the problem - of sharing our space with other living things, be they dogs, trees, fish or penguins.

I want viewers to see that everything is connected, even the little guys like pollinators and flowers.

They are unique in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life that they enclose.

Life is a force in its own right. It is a new element. And it has altered the Earth. It covers Earth like a skin.

Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere.

To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.

Basically, the intersection between the animal world and the plant world is where life regenerates itself over and over, billions of times each day. It's the foundation of life on our planet.

No phenomenon can be isolated, but has repercussions through every aspect of our lives. We are learning that we are a fundamental part of nature's ecosystems.

Culture is how biology responds and makes its living conditions better.